Propaganda is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth). Deliberateness and a relatively heavy emphasis on manipulation distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the free and easy exchange of ideas. The propagandist has a specified goal or set of goals. To achieve these he deliberately selects facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and presents them in ways he thinks will have the most effect. To maximize effect, he may omit pertinent facts or distort them, and he may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people whom he is trying to sway) from everything but his own propaganda.

Comparatively deliberate selectivity and manipulation also distinguish propaganda from education. The educator tries to present various sides of an issue—the grounds for doubting as well as the grounds for believing the statements he makes, and the disadvantages as well as the advantages of every conceivable course of action. Education aims to induce the reactor to collect and evaluate evidence for himself and assists him in learning the techniques for doing so. It must be noted, however, that a given propagandist may look upon himself as an educator, may believe that he is uttering the purest truth, that he is emphasizing or distorting certain aspects of the truth only to make a valid message more persuasive, and that the courses of action that he recommends are in fact the best actions that the reactor could take. By the same token, the reactor who regards the propagandist’s message as self-evident truth may think of it as educational; this often seems to be the case with “true believers”—dogmatic reactors to dogmatic religious or social propaganda. “Education” for one person may be “propaganda” for another.

Propaganda and related concepts

Connotations of the term propaganda

The word propaganda itself, as used in recent centuries, apparently derives from the title and work of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagation of the Faith), an organization of Roman Catholic cardinals founded in 1622 to carry on missionary work. To many Roman Catholics the word may therefore have, at least in missionary or ecclesiastical terms, a highly respectable connotation. But even to these persons, and certainly to many others, the term is often a dirty one tending to connote such things as the discredited atrocity stories and deceptively stated war aims of World Wars I and II, the operations of the Nazis’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the broken campaign promises of a thousand politicians. Also, it is reminiscent of countless instances of false and misleading advertising (especially in countries using Latin languages, in which propagande commerciale or some equivalent is a common term for commercial advertising).

To informed students of communism, the term propaganda has yet another connotation, associated with the term agitation. The two terms were first used by the Marxist Georgy Plekhanov and later elaborated upon by Lenin in a pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1902), in which he defined “propaganda” as the reasoned use of historical and scientific arguments to indoctrinate the educated and enlightened (the attentive and informed publics, in the language of today’s social sciences); he defined “agitation” as the use of slogans, parables, and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the uneducated and the unreasonable. Since he regarded both strategies as absolutely essential to political victory, he twinned them in the term agitprop. Today every unit of a communist party must have an agitprop section, and to the communist the use of propaganda in Lenin’s sense is commendable and honest. Thus, a standard Soviet manual for teachers of social sciences was entitled Propagandistu politekonomii (For the Propagandist of Political Economy), and a pocket-sized booklet issued weekly to suggest timely slogans and brief arguments to be used in speeches and conversations among the masses was called Bloknot agitatora (The Agitator’s Notebook).

Related to the general sense of propaganda is the concept of “propaganda of the deed.” This denotes taking nonsymbolic action (such as economic or coercive action), not for its direct effects but for its possible propagandistic effects. Examples of propaganda of the deed would include staging an atomic “test” or the public torture of a criminal for its presumable deterrent effect on others, or giving foreign “economic aid” primarily to influence the recipient’s opinions or actions and without much intention of building up the recipient’s economy.

Distinctions are sometimes made between overt propaganda, in which the propagandist and perhaps his backers are made known to the reactor, and covert propaganda, in which the source is secret or disguised. Covert propaganda might include such things as unsigned political advertisements, clandestine radio stations using false names, and statements by editors, politicians, or others who have been secretly bribed by governments, political backers, or business firms. Sophisticated diplomatic negotiation, legal argument, collective bargaining, commercial advertising, and political campaigns are of course quite likely to include considerable amounts of both overt and covert propaganda, accompanied by propaganda of the deed.

Another term related to propaganda is psychological warfare (sometimes abbreviated to psychwar), which is the prewar or wartime use of propaganda directed primarily at confusing or demoralizing enemy populations or troops, putting them off guard in the face of coming attacks, or inducing them to surrender.

Still another related concept is that of brainwashing. This term usually means intensive political indoctrination. It may involve long political lectures or discussions, long compulsory reading assignments, and so forth, sometimes in conjunction with efforts to reduce the reactor’s resistance by exhausting him either physically through torture, overwork, or denial of sleep or psychologically through solitary confinement, threats, emotionally disturbing confrontations with interrogators or defected comrades, humiliation in front of fellow citizens, and the like. The term brainwashing has been widely used in sensational journalism to refer to such activities (and to many other activities) when they have allegedly been conducted by Maoists in China and elsewhere.

Another related word, advertising, has mainly commercial connotations, though it need not be restricted to this; political candidates, party programs, and positions on political issues may be “packaged” and “marketed” by advertising firms. The words promotion and public relations have wider, vaguer connotations and are often used to avoid the implications of “advertising” or “propaganda.” “Publicity” and “publicism” often imply merely making a subject known to a public, without educational, propagandistic, or commercial intent.

Signs, symbols, and media used in contemporary propaganda

The contemporary propagandist with money and imagination can use a very wide range of signs, symbols, and media to convey his message. Signs are simply stimuli—“information bits” capable of stimulating, in some way, the human organism. These include sounds, such as words, music, or a 21-gun salvo; gestures (a military salute, a thumbed nose); postures (a weary slump, folded arms, a sit-down, an aristocratic bearing); structures (a monument, a building); items of clothing (a uniform, a civilian suit); visual signs (a poster, a flag, a picket sign, a badge, a printed page, a commemorative postage stamp, a swastika scrawled on a wall); and so on and on.

A symbol is a sign having a particular meaning for a given reactor. Two or more reactors may of course attach quite different meanings to the same symbol. Thus, to Nazis the swastika was a symbol of racial superiority and the crushing military might of the GermanVolk; to some Asiatic and North American peoples it is a symbol of universal peace and happiness. Some Christians who find a cross reassuring may find a hammer and sickle displeasing and may derive no religious satisfaction at all from a Muslim crescent, a Hindu cow, or a Buddhist lotus.

The contemporary propagandist can employ elaborate social-scientific research facilities, unknown in previous epochs, to conduct opinion surveys and psychological interviews in efforts to learn the symbolic meanings of given signs for given reactors around the world and to discover what signs leave given reactors indifferent because, to them, these signs are without meaning.

Media are the means—the channels—used to convey signs and symbols to the intended reactor or reactors. A comprehensive inventory of media used in 20th-century propaganda could cover many pages. Written media include letters, handbills, posters, billboards, newspapers, magazines, books, and handwriting on walls and streets. Among audiovisual media, television may be the most powerful for many purposes. Television can convey a great many types of signs simultaneously; it can gain heavy impact from mutually reinforcing gestures, words, postures, and sounds and a background of symbolically significant leaders, celebrities, historic settings, architectures, flags, music, placards, maps, uniforms, insignia, cheering or jeering mobs or studio audiences, and staged assemblies of prestigious or powerful people. Other audiovisual media include public speakers, motion pictures, theatres, marching bands, mass demonstrations, picketing, face-to-face conversations between individuals, and “talking” exhibits at fairs, expositions, and art shows.

The larger the propaganda enterprise, the more important are such mass media as television and the press and also the organizational media—that is, pressure groups set up under leaders and technicians who are skilled in using many sorts of signs and media to convey messages to particular reactors. Vast systems of diverse organizations can be established in the hope of reaching leaders and followers of all groups (organized and unorganized) in a given area, such as a city, region, nation or coalition of nations, or the entire world. Pressure organizations are especially necessary, for example, in closely fought sales campaigns or political elections, especially in socially heterogeneous areas that have extremely divergent regional traditions, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, and educational levels and very unequal income distributions. Diversities of these sorts make it necessary for products to be marketed in local terms and for political candidates to appear to be friends of each of perhaps a dozen or more mutually hostile ethnic groups, of the educated and the uneducated, and of the very wealthy as well as the poverty-stricken.

Early commentators and theories

The archaeological remains of ancient civilizations indicate that dazzling clothing and palaces, impressive statues and temples, magic tokens and insignia, and elaborate legal and religious arguments have been used for thousands of years, presumably to convince the common people of the purported greatness and supernatural prowess of kings and priests. Instructive legends and parables, easily memorized proverbs and lists of commandments—such as the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity and the Hindu Manu-smriti (Laws of Manu)—and highly selective chronicles of rulers’ achievements have been used to enlist mass support for particular social and religious systems. Very probably, much of what was said in antiquity was sincere, in the sense that the underlying religious and social assumptions were so fully accepted that the warlords’ spokesmen, the pharaohs’ priests, and their audiences believed all or most of what was communicated and hence did not deliberate or theorize very much about alternative arguments or means of persuasion.

The systematic, detached, and deliberate analysis of propaganda, in the West, at least, may have begun in Athens about 500 bc, as the study of rhetoric (Greek: “the technique of orators”). The tricks of using sonorous and solemn language, carefully gauged humour, artful congeniality, appropriate mixtures of logical and illogical argument, and flattery of a jury or a mob were formulated from the actual practices of successful lawyers, demagogues, and politicians. Relatively ethical teachers such as Isocrates, Plato, and Aristotle compiled rules of rhetoric (1) to make their own arguments and those of their students more persuasive and (2) to design counterpropaganda against opponents and also (3) to teach their students how to detect the logical fallacies and emotional appeals of demagogues.

Early students of rhetoric also examined what today’s analysts would call the problem of source credibility—what a speaker can say or do to convince his hearers that he is telling the truth, is well intentioned, is public-spirited, and so forth. For example, an Athenian lawyer defending an undersized man on trial for murder might instruct him to say to a jury: “Is it likely that an undersized man like me, so often ridiculed for being clumsy with a sword, would have attacked and killed this very tall war veteran who is famous everywhere for his swordsmanship?” But a tall and strong defendant might be told to invert the plea: “Would any man of my unusual height, who is rather well known to have slain 300 Persians in sword fights, have allowed himself to be drawn into a quarrel with this puny man—knowing full well that a jury of reasonable Athenians would be inclined from the start to hold me guilty if someone killed him?” So well did Greek rhetoricians analyze the arts of legal sophistry and political demagoguery that their efforts were imitated and further developed in Rome by such figures as Cicero and Quintilian. Aristotle’s Rhetoric and similar works by others have, indeed, served as model texts for Western scholars and students until this day.

There have been similar lines of thought in other major civilizations. In ancient India, the Buddha, and in ancient China, Confucius, both advocated, much as Plato had, the use of truthfulness, “good” rhetoric, and “proper” forms of speech and writing as means of persuading men, by both precept and example, to live the good life. In the 4th century bc in India, Kautilya, a Brahman believed to have been chief minister to the emperor Chandragupta Maurya, reputedly wrote the Artha-shastra (“The Science of Material Gain”), a book of advice for rulers that has often been compared with Plato’s Republic and Machiavelli’s much later work The Prince. Kautilya discussed, in some detail, the use of psychological warfare, both overt and clandestine, in efforts to disrupt an enemy’s army and capture his capital. Overtly, he said, the propagandists of a king should proclaim that he can do magic, that God and the wisest men are on his side, and that all who support his war aims will reap benefits. Covertly, his agents should infiltrate his enemies’ and potential enemies’ kingdoms, spreading defeatism and misleading news among their people, especially in capital cities, among leaders, and among the armed forces. In particular, a king should employ only Brahmans, unquestionably the holiest and wisest of men, as propagandists and diplomatic negotiators. These morally irreproachable experts should cultivate the goodwill of their king’s friends, and of friends of his friends, and also should woo the enemies of his enemies. A king should not hesitate, however, to break any friendships or alliances that are later found to be disadvantageous.

Similar advice is found in Bingfa (The Art of War) by the Chinese theorist Sunzi, who wrote at about the same time. “All warfare,” he said, “is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.”

The spread of all complex political systems and religions probably has been due very largely to a combination of earnest conviction and the deliberate use of propaganda. This mixture can be detected in the recasting in various times and places of the legends of the messiah in Christianity and Judaism, of heroes of the Hindu Mahabharata, of the Buddha, of the ancestral Japanese Sun Goddess, of the lives of Muhammad and his relatives, of the Christian saints, of such Marxist heroes as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and even in the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

Scattered and sometimes enlightening comment on political and religious propaganda has occurred in all major civilizations. In ancient Greece and Rome there was much writing on election tactics. In 16th-century Italy, Machiavelli discussed, very much like Kautilya and Sunzi, the uses of calculated piety and duplicity in peace and war. In Shakespeare’s plays, Mark Antony (in Julius Caesar) and the Duke of Buckingham (Richard III) display the principles of propaganda and discuss them in words and concepts that anticipate the present-day behavioral scientist. They refer to such propaganda stratagems as the seizure and monopolization of propaganda initiatives, the displacement of guilt onto others (scapegoating), the presentation of oneself as morally superior, and the coordination of propaganda with violence and bribery.

Modern research and the evolution of current theories

After the decline of the ancient world, no elaborate systematic study of propaganda appeared for centuries—not until the Industrial Revolution had brought about mass production and raised hopes of immensely high profits through mass marketing. Toward the beginning of the 20th century, researchers began to undertake studies of the motivations of many types of consumers and of their responses to various kinds of salesmanship, advertising, and other marketing techniques. From the early 1930s on, there have been “consumer surveys” much in the manner of public-opinion surveys. Almost every conceivable variable affecting consumers’ opinions, beliefs, suggestibilities, and behaviour has been investigated for every kind of group, subgroup, and culture in the major capitalist nations. Consumers’ wants and habits are beginning to be studied in the same ways in the socialist countries—partly to promote economic efficiency and partly to prevent political unrest. Data on the wants and habits of voters as well as consumers are now being gathered in the same elaborate ways in many parts of the world.

Large quantities of such information on consumers and voters are stored and statistically processed by computers and are drawn upon for nationwide and international advertising campaigns costing billions of dollars annually. Such advertising—including political advertising—occupies a very high percentage of radio and television time and of newspaper, magazine, and billboard space in countries where it is permitted. By conservative estimates $140,000,000 was spent in the U.S. presidential election of 1952, $155,000,000 in that of 1956, $175,000,000 in 1960, and $200,000,000 in 1964. On paid media the Republican Party was estimated to have spent more than $23,000,000 and the Democratic Party over $25,000,000, for their presidential and vice presidential candidates in 1984. Critics have argued that advertising expenditures on such a scale, whether for deodorants or presidents, tend to waste society’s resources and also to preclude effective competition by rival producers or politicians who cannot raise equally large amounts of money. A rising tide of consumer resistance and voter skepticism is leading to various attempts at consumer education, voter education, counterpropaganda, and proposals for regulatory legislation.

As far back as the early 1920s, there developed an awareness among many social critics that the extension of the vote and of enlarged purchasing power to more and more of the ignorant or ill-educated meant larger and larger opportunities for both demagogic and public-spirited propagandists to make headway by using fictions and myths, utopian appeals, and “the noble lie.” Interest was aroused not only by the lingering horror of World War I and of the postwar settlements but also by publication of Ivan Pavlov’s experiments on conditioned reflexes and of analyses of human motivations by various psychoanalysts. Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922) was particularly relevant to the study of leaders, propagandists, and followers, as were Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

In 1927, an American political scientist, Harold D. Lasswell, published a now-famous book, Propaganda Technique in the World War, a dispassionate description and analysis of the massive propaganda campaigns conducted by all the major belligerents in World War I. This he followed with studies of communist propaganda and of many other forms of communication. Within a few years, a great many other social scientists, along with historians, journalists, and psychologists, were producing a wide variety of publications purporting to analyze military, political, and commercial propaganda of many types. During the Nazi period and the period of World War II and the subsequent cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, a great many researchers and writers, both skilled and unskilled, scholarly and unscholarly, were employed by governments, political movements, and business firms to conduct propaganda. Some of those who had scientific training designed very carefully controlled experiments or intelligence operations, attempting to quantify data on appeals of various types of propaganda to given reactors.

In the course of this theory building and research, the study of propaganda advanced a long way on the road from lore to science. Today several hundred more or less scholarly books and thousands of articles shed substantial light on the psychology, techniques, and effects of propaganda campaigns, major and minor.

In recent decades, nearly every significant government, political party, special-interest group, social movement, and big business firm in the advanced countries has developed its own corps of specialized researchers, propagandists, or “opinion managers” (sometimes referred to as information specialists, lobbyists, legislative representatives, or vice presidents in charge of public relations). Some have become members of parliaments, cabinets, and corporate boards of directors. The most expert among them sometimes are highly skilled or trained, or both, in history, psychiatry, politics, social psychology, survey research, and statistical inference.

Many of the bigger and wealthier propaganda agencies conduct (overtly and covertly) elaborate observations and opinion surveys, among samples of the leaders, the middle strata, and the rank and file of all social groups, big and little, whom they hope to influence. They tabulate many kinds of data concerning those contents of the press, films, television, and organizational media that reach given groups. They chart the responses of reactors, through time, by statistical formulas. They conduct “symbol campaigns” and “image-building” operations with mathematical calculation, using quantities of data that can be processed only by computers. To the ancient art of rhetoric, the “technique of orators,” have been added the techniques of the psychopolitical analyst and the media man and the know-how of the administrators of giant advertising agencies, public relations firms, and governmental ministries of information that employ armies of analytic specialists and “symbol-handlers.”

It is a commonplace among the highly educated that men in the mass—and even men on high educational and social levels—often react more favourably to utopian myths, wishful thinking, and nonrational residues of earlier experiences than they do to the sober analysis of facts. The average citizen who may be aware of being duped is not likely to have enough education, time, or economic means to defend himself against the massive organizations of opinion managers and hidden persuaders. Indeed, to affect them he would have to act through large organizations himself and to use, to some extent, the very means used by those he seeks to control. The still greater “curse of bigness” that may evolve in the future is viewed with increasing concern by many politically conscious people.

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A message that is intended primarily to serve the interests of the messenger-this is the basic definition of propaganda. It may also be defined as the spreading of information in order to influence public opinion and to manipulate other people’s beliefs. Information can be delivered in many ways. Schoolteachers try to give accurate information to their students, and television news broadcasts attempt to provide it for their audiences. What separates propaganda from these is the quality of the information and the way it is used.

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